Center seat armrests are well known in the art, and are used particularly with motor vehicle bench-type seats. The center seat armrest, as the name implies, provides a convenient place in a center portion of a seat for a passenger to rest his or her arm. Moreover, center seat armrests may be equipped with a variety of useful and convenient features such as storage bins, cup holders, and the like. Typically, a center seat armrest is configured to pivot, allowing the armrest to be translated between a stowed configuration (usually at least partially or fully nested within a recess in the vehicle seat back whereby a seat back for a passenger is provided) and a deployed, substantially horizontal configuration for use by adjacent passengers.
To deploy the armrest, usually it is necessary only to grasp the armrest or a handle attached to the armrest and pull forward. That is, for convenience the user typically does not have to actuate a dedicated locking/unlocking mechanism in order to use the armrest. Instead, a friction fit between the armrest and a receiver defined in the seat back is most often relied on to keep the armrest in a stowed configuration. However, while convenient, this admits of inadvertent and undesired deployment of the armrest. For example, this could be caused by vehicle deceleration created by a frontal impact to the vehicle, causing an otherwise unrestrained center armrest to deploy.
To solve this and other problems, the present disclosure relates to a vehicle seat center armrest inertial lock configured to retain the center armrest substantially in a stowed configuration in the event of a frontal impact to the vehicle. Advantageously, the inertial lock allows normal deployment of the center armrest by a user, without requiring the user to actuate a locking/unlocking mechanism. However, in the event of a frontal impact to the vehicle, the inertial lock prevents inadvertent and undesired deployment of the armrest caused by the forward inertial energy of the impact.